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Debi Hamilton

Debi Hamilton

Debi Hamilton is a Melbourne writer, poet, and psychologist. She was joint winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014, and her second poetry collection, The Sly Night Creatures of Desire, was published in 2016.

Debi Hamilton on the tyranny of sound

April 2023, no. 452 27 March 2023
Back in the early 1980s, when I was working in Canberra as a public servant in an open-plan office, I obtained a doctor’s certificate declaring that I was allergic to cigarette smoke. I wasn’t – not at least in any strict medical sense. I was merely a healthy non-smoker who found being enveloped in clouds of second-hand cigarette smoke distressing and unpleasant. The doctor’s letter was ... (read more)

'903 ways to see Melbourne' by Debi Hamilton

November 2015, no. 376 26 October 2015
It was watching the empty buses leave in the dark outside the restaurant that did it. I was eating with my lover and my daughter on a June evening in Altona when I found myself being distracted by the rooms of light, quite empty, that floated behind my daughter's back. Every ten or fifteen minutes there would be another one heading off into the night, passengerless, to complete a huge orbit of Mel ... (read more)

'Out of Bounds' by Debi Hamilton

December 2013–January 2014, no. 357 01 December 2013
Last week I received an envelope in the mail, the address written in my father’s hand. My heart accelerated a little and it struck me as unseemly, at my age and in my circumstances, to be still so easily rattled by a parent. The envelope was light – inside I found only a newspaper clipping and a small note. I spread them out on the kitchen bench. A friend was staying with me – a recent acqu ... (read more)